Hi all.
I know some of you thought I was gone. But I'm just doing what I do-- which is not legal, or business. It's watching server logs and banning things.
There are automated image services you are likely to want to ban. Many uses will be harmless, but they can be used by anyone. Anyone means-- of course-- trolls seeking images.
The first user agent to block:
WordPress.com mShots;
http://support.wordpress.com/contact/If you goolge on 'mShots' you will see it's a fun convenient sounding feature for bloggers. But there is a publicly available plugin that anyone can use to automatically take screen shots of any web page. I think the incoming IP will be Automatic-- which is wordpress. But the screenshot is sent to "whomever". (In reality, very few visitors run screen shots of blogs in their sidebar. So, likely all the visits by 'mShots' to my blog are what I would call "dubious".)
The second user agent to bloc: Anything containing SUSE. For example:
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 SUSE/3.6.10-0.3.1 Firefox/3.6.10
Browsers containing "Linux" are often run by servers. Servers are very handy things to run imagescraping scripts (which generally you want to discourage at your site.) However, depending on your audience, you don't want to block everything running Linux. (Many of my blog visitors browse the web from workstations running linux.) But SUSE/3.6 is a bitmap feature. Being optimized for bitmaps is very handy for image scrapers. For others: not so much (it makes the browser slow for humans.) This particular UA was left by
http://www.shrinktheweb.com/reqstatus?status=1&hash=ece31cfcdf89736101398c3e1fb645ad (It was also blocked by my auto-blocking software, but not because of the user agent.)
So: I advise blocking anything with 'SUSE' or 'mshots' in the user agent.
Topic: Image stripping image browser and feature. (Read 3019 times)